Second Engineering Cycle Highlights

Second Engineering Cycle Highlights

As we come to the end of our second engineering cycle, I thought it would be interesting to highlight some of the most significant initiatives happening in Linaro. I believe these four initiatives are having the biggest impact on how we are demonstrating Linaro delivering on its initial mandate.

Linaro Evaluation Builds (LEBs): We’ve had an almost universally positive reaction to the initiative we started this year – to deliver evaluation builds of popular OSS distributions on our Member’s hardware. Our initial targets are Android and Ubuntu. The LEBs provide an integration point for Linaro Working Group output, delivered on a standard platform for the relevant OS. They will make it easier for the distributions to adopt Linaro software, reduce time to market for our Members through streamlined integration and validation of our Landing Team efforts, and mediate the flow of innovation between Linaro and each OSS distribution’s engineering teams.

Landing Teams: All our SiP Members now have “Landing Teams” up and running – a service offered by Linaro where a small team works exclusively with the Member’s existing BSP engineers. Their focus is to ensure that on HW launch, the latest Linaro and upstream code works on the latest hardware. An exciting aspect is we are seeing Linaro and the Landing Teams in particular acting as the catalyst for change inside the organizations as they work out the best ways of engaging with and profiting from OSS.

Linaro Showcase: At our planning summit in May, we’ll be showcasing some of the best work delivered out of the various Linaro teams to date. We’ll also have demos of our Member’s hardware running Linaro software as well as Community demos. What I’m particularly looking forward to here is seeing how TI, Freescale, ST-E, Samsung, ARM and IBM engineers have been working collaboratively to deliver major advances in Linux OSS on ARM.

http://status.linaro.org: Widely acclaimed inside and outside Linaro, this provides an always up-to-date status report of every Linaro requirement we are working on in the current engineering cycle. What users particularly like about this report is you can drill right down from a high level summary of the requirement to the detailed work item every engineer is working on that day.

As we deliver on our mandate and demonstrate the output, we are seeing continuing depth of engagement from our Members in Linaro. Coupled with this, we are also seeing increasing involvement from the wider community, and a number of important OSS companies and individuals are now involved in Linaro – expect to see further announcements in this area soon. Finally, other silicon vendors are watching Linaro with interest, as they see the value the current Members are deriving.

We’re an organization that is growing in influence and stature. When we launched, it was a small team of 25 engineers backed by blue chip investors. As we approach our one year anniversary, that team has grown to over 100 engineers with a rapidly increasing ecosystem and highly productive output.

Steve is responsible for promoting Linaro value and growing the ecosystem. With over 25 years experience in technology and over 15 of those spent working in Asia, Steve’s career prior to Linaro splits into four areas: software marketing from start-up to pre-IPO, world-leading Taiwanese ODM hardware marketing and sales, online media development for a high-tech daily newspaper, and corporate communications. Fluent in spoken Chinese and rusty in Postscript, Pascal, ASP, typography and color science, Steve has always enjoyed working to help technology companies communicate clearly.